Interesting piece here from The Economist on using search engines to help with technological innovation.
The article's key idea is to turn innovation on its head. Instead of starting with a problem and looking for a solution: start with your collection of known solutions and see if you can find problems that they solve. Or, better still, if you see a "problem", search amongst all the known solutions out there and see if one will "fit".
That's, of course, where search engines come into play. The article looks at the latest "natural language" search engines - that make this type of searching a whole lot easier. And of course, someone's already got the "innovation search engine" idea in production. Accelovation recently went live with their "market discovery software".
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The problem with most organisations' strategies
Our principal at 2nd Road, Tony Golsby-Smith, recently wrote an interesting article for the Journal of Business Strategy: "The second road of thought: how design offers strategy a new toolkit" (Vol 28, No. 4, 2007).
He claims that the only way you can do strategy well is to reconceive it as an exercise in "design". I'll get to this later. But what's clearly prompted him to make this claim is the state of strategy in most organisations we see. There is a clear disconnect between what strategy could, and should, do in most organisations, and what it actually ends up doing.
As Tony says, "strategy should be the process that enables organisations to create new futures and engage their people in that exciting task". But too often "it weighs an organisation down with more data and inputs". Too often, organisations' strategies miss the vital elements of "coherence", "energy" and excitement.
The solution? See strategy as a design exercise. Not an analytics exercise. But how do we start to get our heads around "design"? By looking at the first principles of design thinking. And they can be found in the realm of rhetoric. So to start this journey, we'd better talk about rhetoric and the "two roads" story.
He claims that the only way you can do strategy well is to reconceive it as an exercise in "design". I'll get to this later. But what's clearly prompted him to make this claim is the state of strategy in most organisations we see. There is a clear disconnect between what strategy could, and should, do in most organisations, and what it actually ends up doing.
As Tony says, "strategy should be the process that enables organisations to create new futures and engage their people in that exciting task". But too often "it weighs an organisation down with more data and inputs". Too often, organisations' strategies miss the vital elements of "coherence", "energy" and excitement.
The solution? See strategy as a design exercise. Not an analytics exercise. But how do we start to get our heads around "design"? By looking at the first principles of design thinking. And they can be found in the realm of rhetoric. So to start this journey, we'd better talk about rhetoric and the "two roads" story.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Leveraging design
Maureen Thurston, in a soon to be published article, attempts a definition of what it means for an organisation to "leverage design". The key idea is to lift design out of one particular product silo - where it typically plays a tactical, down-stream role, and position it as a peer of Marketing, Strategy, Finance and Operations. This allows design to play a broader role as well as to be held accountable and to be involved early on in key initiatives.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
